The Wheel of Fortune (161 page)

I paused to consider my position. I now had ten minutes—ten minutes to confront Kester, ten minutes to bargain with him, ten minutes to salvage my future—and then I had to turn back with him to the mainland if we were to avoid Bryn-Davies’s fate on the Shipway. The discussion could be continued on the return journey, of course, but the crucial foundations of our agreement had to be laid during those initial minutes when he would be frightened and pliable. Was I setting myself an impossible task by trying to shake him to the core in such a limited time? Not necessarily. It depended on how limited the time was—and that in turn depended on where Kester was now but I thought it almost certain that he was relaxing just beyond the bend in the path which lay some way ahead of me. I couldn’t believe he’d be heading for the Outer Head and a night in splendid isolation beneath the stars. No, he’d be pausing to rest and then—within the next few minutes—he’d be coming back to the Shipway to begin the return journey.

Rather than pursue him farther I decided my best course of action was now to conserve my energy, drum up all my courage and wait. Fine. This was where I drew the line and behaved like a rational human being. I’d wait for Kester, give him the shock of his life and then launch myself on some forceful but nonviolent bargaining. Dead simple. What could be easier? What course of action could be safer or more sensible? I’d be all right. He’d be all right. We might experience some nasty moments but we were both going to battle through the meeting without destroying each other.

I drew the line.

I waited.

Nothing happened. No Kester. The sun went on shining, the tide went on rising but Kester didn’t come back.

I was just looking at my watch for the umpteenth time when such a horrifying thought occurred to me that I nearly passed out.

Supposing I had, finally, gone off my rocker. Supposing I’d hallucinated and had only imagined that I’d seen Kester ahead of me. My whole pursuit of him had had such a dreamlike quality, a mysterious quest in a setting so beautiful that it might have been a landscape of myth, and Kester had moved as a wraith in my imagination, traveling so steadily, not once looking back, never showing me his face.

I thought: It’s no good, I’ve got to go on.

Well, I mean, I really did have to go on, didn’t I? I had to know he was real and not some nightmarish projection of my disordered mind. I couldn’t have stopped myself, not at that stage. I couldn’t possibly have stayed where I was.

So I took a step forward—and as I did so the die was cast,
I’d crossed that line,
I could only move forward to destruction. …

PART SIX

Hal
1966 AND AFTERWARDS

NOT TODAY, O LORD
,

O, not today, think not upon the fault

My father made in compassing the crown!

I Richard’s body have interred anew,

And on it have bestowed more contrite tears

Than from it issued forced drops of blood …

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Henry V

1

I

O
XMOON WAS DESTROYED,
the Oxmoon of my childhood, Kester’s shrine to Anna, his monument to beauty and peace. The mid-twentieth century was brutal to houses like Oxmoon. Racked by fiscal assaults and hammered by financial disasters, the estate broke up and the house drifted on towards extinction.

I went back in the summer of ’66. It was two years since I’d last been there. I’d been trying to escape from the past but escape had proved impossible. I’d realized in the end that I was wasting my time, and when I reassessed my life after my friends died I saw how hung up I was. Yet now I was beyond mere fashionable phraseology. I was determined that there should be no more excuses that I was “hung up” and that Oxmoon was “irrelevant,” no more escaping from reality by bucketing around in a psychedelic minibus on a tidal wave of cheap wine and sweet smoke, no more pretending that the past could no longer touch me. If I was to have any kind of worthwhile future I now had to take time out from the present to exorcise the ghosts that haunted me.

To my surviving friends I merely said, “I quit.”

But to myself I said, I’m going home.

II

The iron gates were rusted, padlocked against vandals. The wall looked as if it had been freshly crowned with broken glass, but when I left the road and followed the footpath uphill towards Penhale Down I found the wall untouched by the new defenses. The door into the grounds was bolted. I climbed the nearest tree, swung along a branch and dropped down on the far side of the wall without breaking a leg. Picking up my duffel bag I moved on. Brambles tore at my leather jacket. The wet undergrowth drenched my jeans. The path was so overgrown that it was barely visible and above my head the dense foliage of the trees dimmed the light of the gray summer afternoon.

It was very quiet. When I came to the ruined tower I found that more of the upper walls had collapsed, tearing the heavy creeper apart. I paused to look upon its corpse and suddenly I was so conscious of death that I found it hard to believe I was still alive. I moved swiftly on but at the edge of the woods a dead wilderness stretched before me. The tennis court was a memory, the netting rotted beside the posts. The lawn was ravaged by weeds and littered with rusted croquet hoops. And beyond the lawn was the house, another corpse, its shuttered windows blind to the light, its derelict walls waiting for their inevitable demolition.

I said one word, an obscenity, and moved on.

Skirting the terrace, where weeds were growing, I walked around the house to the side door. The frame was rotted. One hard shove broke the lock. I went in. I held my breath and the silence came to meet me, the silence of death and disintegration, the silence of my jail, the past. I had to find a way of living with that silence, but how does one live with death and how does one bear the unbearable?

I was standing in the passage by the television room, the passage which connected the ballroom to the main part of the house. Turning aside I walked down the corridor to the hall.

The light was gloomy because of the fastened shutters but I could see a hundred spiders’ webs, intricate and beautiful, linking the posts of the banisters on the staircase. The vast chandelier was caked in dust. I stared up at it and then as I stepped forward impulsively the silence was broken by the echo of my footfall on the marble floor.

“Ah!” I said, although why I spoke I didn’t know. Echoes vibrated in my mind but when I again paused to listen they fell silent. I walked into the dining room. Little puffs of dust rose from the carpet as I crossed it. The long table and all the chairs were swathed in dust sheets, but the paneling was as ageless as the marble floor of the hall, and on either side of the fireplace the carved swags of fruit and flowers seemed to glow uncannily in the dim light.

The house was dead but Kester’s treasures were still alive, waiting for the inevitable day when they would be auctioned to pay the death duties, and meanwhile they too were locked up in the past, entombed in that atmosphere of decay.

Yet when I looked at the carvings again they seemed to pulse with life, and suddenly I heard the echo again, a little louder, a little closer to me in time.

I went into the drawing room. The eighteenth-century furniture was invisible beneath the dust sheets, but the great Gainsborough painting shone in the twilight and on the mantelshelf the four china cherubs were still holding aloft the dial of time. I found the key. It was still in the vase nearby. I wound the clock. The pendulum needed a nudge, no more, and then the silence was broken at last as time began to run again for Oxmoon, not time present but time past, the golden past which I had thought lost beyond recall.

I wound up the clock in the morning room. I was winding time on yet winding time back, and as I turned the key I remembered Bronwen telling me long ago after my mother’s death that time was a circle and that the past could not only coexist with the present but even lie ahead of the present in the future.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, thudded the grandfather clock in the hall, and as I turned away, I saw the dusty chandelier glitter in my mind. I ran back into the drawing room. I ripped aside the dust sheets. The room blazed with blue and gold.

“Beauty …”

I was in the dining room again. The dust sheets were swirling to the floor and I saw the great carved chair as I had seen it in my childhood, a chair for heroes, the magic throne of my magician.

“Truth …”

I flung wide the library door. The books were all there, just as I remembered. I began to wind the clock.

“Art …”

Tick-tock, tick-tock, sang the clock as my fingers closed on
Wuthering Heights.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, shouted the clock as I pulled out
The Prisoner of Zenda.

“Peace …”

I was in the ballroom. I saw myself reflected in the clouded mirrors. Sitting down at the piano, I tried to play “Walk Right Back” but the notes were out of tune so I stopped playing and sang instead as the lyric played itself back in my memory. “ ‘I want you to tell me why you walked out on me …’ ” I had sung the lyric so often at one-nighters up and down the country but I had never until that moment connected that song with my past at Oxmoon. “ ‘I want you to know that since you walked out on me, nothing seems to be the same old way …’ ” I broke off and moved to the doors but although I stopped singing, the song went on playing in my mind. “Walk right back to me this minute …” But there could be no walking back.

Or could there?

Fourteen years ago he had walked out on me by committing suicide but now I had finally willed myself to face his memory and against all the odds he was walking right back after all into my life.

And what did I feel? Rage that he had abandoned me? Contempt that he had taken a coward’s way out? Bitterness that he had proved himself a weak man instead of the hero I’d believed him to be? Yes, but beyond all these familiar emotions I was aware this time of something else. I was aware of a deep-rooted and ineradicable bewilderment, and I knew then that there was an unsolved mystery here that no one, least of all myself, had ever begun to unravel.

Kester was dead. But by some magician’s trick he was still alive. My father was still alive. Yet it was as if my father were the one who had died.

I walked back through the house, retrieved my duffel bag and went out through the side door. It had begun to rain but I made no effort to hurry as I walked on past the ruined orangerie and the shambles of the kitchen garden. I felt hot and muddled, and the melody of “Walk Right Back” was reverberating endlessly in my head.

When I reached the stable block I stopped to stare for there in the far corner, just as Humphrey had reported, lay a new oasis of extreme neatness. Part of the stables had been converted into a chic little mews house. Painted a pristine white which was alleviated only by the black front door, it was adorned with window boxes in which geraniums flourished with military precision. Voile curtains gave the windows a hostile glare. The brass of the door gleamed fiercely. To complete the impression of a siege mentality at work a new car stood in the yard; it was an aggressive red mini which displayed its radiator like a watchdog baring its teeth.

I had reached my journey’s end. Here in fortified seclusion, separated from his family, alienated from those who had once supported him, racked by ill health and tortured by a personality that was deeply and incurably neurotic, lived the present and as far as I could see the final master of Oxmoon.

Taking a deep breath I walked up to the front door and rang the bell.

III

My stepmother opened the door. She always paid meticulous attention to her appearance to disguise the fact that she was older than my father, and today was no exception; she was fifty but looked forty. Her narrow figure heightened the illusion of youth but as always I found her physically repellent. Her slate-gray eyes saw too far. In her presence one felt perpetually encircled by a powerful mind and placed ruthlessly in deep analysis.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought you’d turn up eventually. How handsome you look now you’ve cut your hair.” She made this statement in such a deadpan voice that it became a mere clinical observation. “Come in.”

I stepped past her into the living area. The architect had employed an open-plan design. I saw a galley kitchen along the far wall and a pine-paneled alcove where four pine chairs were tucked into a pine dining table. The kitchen cupboards matched the furniture. Electrical appliances were lined up by the sink. Everywhere was immaculate, hygienic, sanitized. Nearby a small sofa and two armchairs were grouped around a large television set. On the wall a bookcase displayed bound medical journals and books on psychiatry.

“Very nice,” I said to my stepmother.

“Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to like it.”

The sound of music drifted towards us through an open doorway. I recognized Sibelius’s
First Symphony.

“How’s Father?”

“Not too bad. I got him out yesterday. We went for a walk on Penhale Down.”

“Quite an achievement.” My father suffered periodically from agoraphobia. “Will he see me?”

“I can’t think why not.” She made it sound as if it were normal for a father and son to greet each other nonchalantly after a two-year estrangement. “Sit down and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

She disappeared through the doorway towards Sibelius’s
First Symphony
and I sat down in front of the blank television screen. I was remembering Humphrey’s information about this new home of my father’s. There were two spare rooms and a bathroom upstairs, but my father and stepmother lived on the ground floor where in the larger of the two bedrooms my father listened to his radio and conducted his long love affair with his record player. The smaller bedroom, like the living area, reflected only my stepmother’s taste in interior decoration. Humphrey had described the predominating color as iceberg-blue.